


Fault

by gringe



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Bed-Wetting, M/M, Wetting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 20:41:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14028327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gringe/pseuds/gringe
Summary: When the shame subsides for a few seconds, the game morphs into one where he tries to assign fault to someone or something. It usually ends up being himself.WARNING: references to child molestation





	Fault

It happened a lot when he was a young child. The argument could be made that is was worse for him than it was for other kids; Asperger's often has a sensory disorder tacked on, and the damp warmth that quickly turned cold and itchy was just physical hell to parallel his shame. It went on for three years, from age four to six, three years of huddling under the covers and convincing himself that he was afraid of the monsters hiding in the dark corners when the monster was truly in his mother's bed.

His father was exasperated, but his mother was kinder about it. Even on her bad days, the worst was that she thought his accidents were the result of someone causing him harm. It was the only time he could recall that her paranoia brushed a fingertip over the truth.

He learned later, though not much later, how ironic his father's frustration had been. After all, the man had undoubtedly been causing the accidents. Enuresis is a common consequence of child sexual abuse. When he was six and the nighttime visits stopped, so did the bed-wetting, and just four years later his father walked out. The child burned his memories and buried his tears, slept with the lights on and tread with sense. Life was what it was.

When he was twelve, his clothes were shredded and his wrists painfully strung to a goalpost, and it wasn't his fault. He couldn't move, he was there for hours, anyone else might've run into the same problem. It wasn't his fault. He managed to wriggle out of the rope and found a tarp discarded on the high jump, wrapped himself in it, scampered home. He awoke much earlier than usual the next morning, gasping as tendrils of his nightmare still reached for him threateningly, and shook with anger at himself when he discovered the soiled sheets. There was no rope tying him to the bed; it was his fault this time.

He thought it had ended when he was six, that the time when he was twelve had been a fluke, an isolated incident, but there he was, fourteen years old and working toward his undergrad, shaking in the wake of a bad dream with a stomach churning in shame over the piss puddled on his sheets. Never had he been so grateful for his young age - he didn't have a roommate as it would have been a liability considering. He trekked down to the laundry room unspotted, with the ruined sheets bundled in his arms and quarters jingling in his pockets. At least it only happened once. He slept peacefully until he was 21.

Ethan was one of his two good childhood friends. Spencer liked boys and he liked girls and he felt funny when he thought about it, wondered if his father was to blame for that. But if Ethan wanted to copulate like senseless animals, he would learn to want it too.

Some of it hurt and he cried but Ethan went slow and paused several times throughout to ask if he wanted to stop, and they made it work. Ethan was trustworthy and it seemed like everything was going to be just fine until he fell asleep.

He woke up with wet sheets. The man across from him was already awake and just staring, mouth opening and shutting like a goldfish. Before Ethan could think of anything to say, Spencer retreated to the restroom and tried to scrub his shame away while he pretended his tears were shower water. This much, he could blame on his father.

He and Ethan didn't have sex anymore after that, and Spencer couldn't say he minded. At least his sheets were dry in the years to come.

And then he was kidnapped. When he had asked to use Hankel's restroom, it had of course been a ploy to get inside the house, but still, it hadn't been entirely deceptive. And then Hankel had him for hours and he really hadn't had much of a choice. But that wasn't the part he had felt sick about. It was all the nights that followed, nightmare after nightmare and trip to the laundry room after trip. Shower after shower and one teary-eyed berating of himself after another.

He'd thought it would stop with the drugs. Spencer had considered that it might be a side effect, in part, of his body becoming weakened with the high. There were only a few weeks between the night he endured Tobias Hankel's handmade hell and the night he dumped his vials of Dilaudid down the kitchen sink, so the drugs were gone, even if their effects weren't. But the accidents continued, and it was stressing him out. And then finally it happened, the thing he'd been managing to avoid by the skin of his teeth. He fell asleep on the jet ride home and woke up damp.

It was unfortunate that he didn’t have a blanket in his bag to pull over himself, but yesterday’s cardigan draped over his lap would suffice. Morgan noticed, though, Reid saw his head turn at the rustling sounds, and the game was up. He moved over to Reid’s spot and took in the predicament.

“You know this kind of thing is caused by too much stress.” Morgan’s voice was low and hushed in order to keep the conversation between the two of them. What normally would have been a stream of statistics in response was a non-committal half shrug, but Morgan pressed, “You’re stressing over this, I can see it, and if you don’t stop, you’ll just have more stress to deal with. So this won’t stop, either.”

Morgan had made a good call; logic was Spencer Reid’s native language. Of course he was shamefaced as could be, but he was also comforted. Morgan provided a human shield as he followed Reid to the bathroom door, and from there on, the incident seemed to be forgotten. The accidents stopped again, mercifully.

He’d almost expected it to start up again after Emily died and he transitioned to spending almost every night on JJ’s sofa, but it hadn’t. He just had grief to deal with and a friend to comfort him, simple and universal and almost freeing. Even if it had started again, that wouldn’t have been so bad, as long as Will hadn’t found out. It was just JJ. She was the only person left on Earth in front of whom it was safe to be vulnerable.

The worst of it by far was in prison, when he would have to get up earlier than the other inmates to visit the laundry rooms. The whole time he felt miserable and shameful and terrified that someone else would find him out. At the very least he didn’t have much energy to devote to thinking about it; he’d never in his life been so consistently fearful, stressed, and despairing as he was during those weeks.

And so now, lying next to Luke, the pissed sheets weren't that big of a deal. The worst thing that could happen? Luke would break up with him, awkwardly. He would be _sad_ about that, sure. But he would be _safe_. There was certainly comfort in knowing that.

And so he lay and pondered whom to blame for this one; his father? He seemed like the go-to answer, given that there had been sexual activity the evening before. But his father’s reach was so far away now, so irrelevant.

Tobias, maybe? He tried not to think of Tobias too much, and lately he was succeeding. Maybe the man’s ghost had finally been laid to rest.

That left himself to blame.

Luke was stirring, on the brink of waking up. That sick and ashamed feeling was visiting him again as his window of solitude was closing, but it wasn’t anything like prison. He was wet and his pant leg clung to his skin and he itched and his boyfriend (boyfriend? Maybe? That wasn’t clearly established.) was probably going to break up with him and he didn’t have to care.

Luke’s eyes finally blinked open. He suddenly, painfully, regretted not stealing away to the shower before Luke woke, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He felt blood rush to his face as Luke took in the state of the sheets.

The other man’s eyes went soft with concern. “Hey. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

He took Luke’s extended arm by the wrist and pulled himself up out of bed, eyes trained on the carpet. It was a cream color, with grey and pale blue flecks.

“Do you want to stop going out with me?” he asked in the bathroom, voice wavering more than he would like it to, as Luke patiently helped tug his clothes off.

“Why?” the other looked genuinely baffled as he paused his actions.

“I pissed in your bed,” he replied in a matter of fact tone.

“That’d be a pretty shitty reason to break up with someone, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded slowly, considering that, and Luke fell silent again for a moment, then grinned impishly, asking,

“So, do you, like wanna shower _together_ , or…”

He gave a pained smile and answered apologetically, “Maybe another day? I, uh… yeah.”

Luke’s wicked grin faded into his concerned expression again, and he nodded. “Yeah, sure, of course. I’ll just take care of the bed sheets.”

He winced. “Aw, Luke, you don’t have to do that.”

“Well I’m going to,” Luke said simply, and waved a hand at the shower, indicating for him to get to it.

Spencer waited until Luke had left the bathroom to strip off his boxers and step into the tub. As he cleaned up, he realised that while he was still embarrassed, he had never felt less shame after one of these incidents. Luke was taking care of the sheets. Luke didn't want to break up with him. Luke, he decided, was a better man than he.

And being such a good man, Luke would undoubtedly want to talk about this when Spencer finished in the shower. Plain and simple well-intentioned concern for his lover, but honestly, Reid wasn’t in the mood to be pried at. And he wasn’t sure that he wanted to explain the origin of this particular issue to Luke, because he knew for certain that he didn’t want to the man he was falling in love with to look at him like he was a broken toy. But then, Luke might not. He’d already taken the bedwetting thing in stride.

So he braced himself, more gently than he could when he was younger, for the conversation to follow. And he marveled for a moment at the sheer fortune of Luke Alvez having fallen seemingly out of the sky and into his path. He was going to be okay, more so than he ever thought he could be.


End file.
